This invention relates to the field of social network data. In particular, the invention relates to crowd-sourcing for gap filling in social networks.
Crowd-sourcing using games has developed as a way to use a large group of people or community to perform a task. Mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies can be leveraged to achieve business goals.
The ESP Game is an interactive game that harnesses the crowd for improving the quality and quantity of metadata on Google's (Google is a Trade Mark of Google, Inc.) indexed images, by introducing an online tagging game for people. The idea behind the game is to use the computational power of humans to perform a task that computers cannot yet do (originally, image recognition) by packaging the task as a game. The ESP game has proved to be an effective mechanism to cover a major part of Google's indexed images, in a relative short time period.
Online social network services (SNSs) are playing an ever-important role in shaping the behavior of users on the web. Popular social sites (such as Facebook (Facebook is a Trade Mark of Facebook, Inc.), MySpace (MySpace is a Trade Mark of News Corporation), Flickr, and del.icio.us (Flickr and del.icio.us are Trade Marks of Yahoo!, Inc.)) are enjoying increasing traffic and are turning into community spaces, where users interact with their friends and acquaintances.
Social network participants often use tagging as a lightweight and flexible approach to classifying information. Tagging enables individuals to use whatever terms they think are appropriate to describe or help them recall a resource without the burden of selecting a category from a known taxonomy. Members of social networks do not only tag items or entities, but also tag people and by that link them to items or entities in the social network. The concept of people-tagging has been presented for various applications, such as augmentation of employee directories, self-promotion and finding colleagues and friends with similar interests, and relationship management for access control.
Collabio (Collabio is a Trade Mark of Microsoft Corporation) presented a social tagging game within an online social network that encourages friends to add tags on one another.